The Walking Dead

The driver's eyes were on the road, flickering between the windscreen and his mirrors, but he talked as a tap dripped. 'Did they ask you? You know what I mean.'

'It is not important what they asked me. You should not talk of it.'

'If men come from abroad, important men, an attack is planned — yes?'

'I don't know what is planned.'

'What I believe, if an attack is planned and important men are coming it will be a martyr attack — so did they ask you?'

'What I was told, what I was not told, should not be talked of.'

At the time of her own recruitment the need for total secrecy had been emphasized, with nothing shared even in the privacy of her family. She did not know how to silence his torrent.

'I am saying it will be a martyr's attack — have you been asked if you would do that?'

'You should drive, not talk.'

'You know what happens to a martyr? 'I saw it on a website. If he has a vest or a belt, his head comes off. The head is taken off. It is how they knew which were the martyrs on the trains in London. They had no heads. In Tel Aviv, they found the head fifteen feet from his body, on a table, and he was still smiling. It was on the website.'

'Do you want me to tell you to stop? Shall I get out and walk?'

'It is not for me. I will help, I will drive and—'

'And you will talk — and by talking you will put all of us at risk,' Faria snarled.

'Do you think they would force one of us to do it, make it impossible to refuse? Could they do that? I support the struggle but—'

'Stop.'

The traffic flowed round them. If he had slowed, cars, vans and lorries would have swerved to overtake on the inside. He could not stop and she knew it.

'It is not just me they might ask, but you…Would you?'

'What I will tell you is this. Tell you once. The important people, when they arrive, I will tell them to dismiss you.'

'You have to think of what you would do if you were asked. There were videos from the struggle in Palestine. Women were used. In Palestine the word for them is shahida. Arafat called them his "army of roses". Women were martyrs who carried the bombs. Arafat said to them, "You are my army of roses that will crush Israeli tanks." Have you not thought of what might be asked of you?'

Her ears were closed to him. Faria could not answer; neither could she threaten again to denounce him for cowardice, for lack of faith, for talking and putting them all into a marksman's sights or a prison cell. She stared from the window and the car brought her towards the town's centre. She had thought that as a stranger to the town he might find it difficult to locate the street that was her home when he came to pick her up, so she had told him, when he had called the mobile, to meet her at the extremity of the station car park. That mobile now lay embedded in the silt of the river Lea that divided the town. Faria had thought, before he had talked through the history of his life, that he could drop her close to home…The looseness of his talk frightened her. At the next set of lights, she swung open the door and was gone. She never looked back at him.

Have you not thought what might be asked of you? Faria had. In her room, at night, she had wrestled with that thought, sweated and been unable to sleep. She had read that in Palestine the funeral of the small pieces of a woman martyr was a 'wedding with eternity'. She could picture in her mind the photograph of the calm face of the shahida Darine Abu Aisha, who had gone to the bus station at Netanya, killed three and injured sixty. A friend had said of her, 'She knew that her destiny was to become the bride of Allah in Paradise.'

She did not know what she would say if it were asked of her.

* * *

'A police officer, in sworn testimony, described you, Mr Curtis, as a "main man", and meant by that, Mr Curtis, that you were a major criminal. Was he right or wrong?'

The defence barrister, in court eighteen, used a low lectern in the front row of the lawyers' territory between the judge's bench and the dock, now occupied only by Ollie Curtis and the minders.

'I can say quite honestly, sir, that the description of me is wrong. It is a lie, a fabrication.'

It was possible for Tools Wright to watch the barrister but not to permit his eyes to waver to the left, into a field of vision that included Ozzie Curtis in the witness box.

'I want to be quite sure of this. You are telling m'lord and the members of the jury that you are not a big player in the criminal underworld?'

'What I am saying, sir, is utterly truthful. I am not a big player, not a major criminal, not a main man.'

Jools watched the barrister ask the questions and listened to the answers. He thought that Ozzie bloody Curtis wriggled like a maggot on a hook.

'You are in fact, Mr Curtis, a businessman and a legitimate trader?'

'That's right, sir, dead right.'